In Tver, memorial plaques in memory of the victims of repression were dismantled. Academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences demanded that the perpetrators be punished

A group of members and professors of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) have issued an open letter protesting the dismantling of two memorial plaques commemorating victims of repression in Tver. The text of the letter was published by Kommersant .

The signs were located on one of the buildings of the Tver Medical University; they were removed on May 7. The inscriptions on the boards read: “In memory of the martyred. Here in the 1930s - 50s there was the NKVD-MGB Directorate for the Kalinin Region and its internal prison" and "In memory of the Poles from the Ostashkov camp, killed by the NKVD in Kalinin for the sake of warning the world."

Academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences note that the dismantling was carried out without public public discussion. The authors of the letter call what happened “an obvious attempt to justify and consign to oblivion the crimes of the Stalinist regime, to create a new version of our history in which there is no place for them.”

“We protest against the revision of the assessment and silencing of the dark pages of our past and demand the restoration of memorial plaques in memory of the victims of the Stalinist regime in their original place, as well as the identification and punishment of those responsible for this crime against national historical memory,” the message says.

The board of the International Memorial also expressed its position.

“Removing these boards is not just vandalism. This is a crime against history, an outrage against the memory of our fellow citizens and Polish prisoners of war who were killed in the basements of this building, another attempt to deny the well-known and repeatedly documented crimes of the Stalinist regime,” says a statement on the organization’s website.

On May 8, the Human Rights Council (HRC) addressed the head of the Prosecutor General’s Office for the Central Federal District, Murat Kabaloev, with a request to check the legality of the removal of memorial plaques in Tver. According to the council, the boards were removed at the request of the prosecutor's office of the Central District of the city.

“The Council is deeply concerned about this information, since this submission does not contain convincing arguments regarding the need to dismantle the memorial plaques, especially on the eve of the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. The decision of the Kalinin city authorities in 1991 to install signs continues to be in effect; the prosecutor’s office has not taken any measures to cancel it,” the HRC emphasized.